The requirements of higher data rates in wireless communications has led to development of new standards and enhancements of existing standards to support the use of multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver to improve communication performance, so called MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) systems. The MIMO technique is used in several radio standards, including; WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network), WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) (3G telecommunications), LTE (Long Term Evolution) (4G telecommunications) and WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access). A MIMO radio normally consists of N transmitters and M receivers, where N and M are integers.
Further, a MIMO radio, excluding digital baseband parts, can be implemented either as a standalone Radio Frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) or as part of a system-on-chip (SoC), where the MIMO radio is implemented together with digital baseband parts on the same physical silicon die.
Since MIMO systems exist in a large number of combinations, for example 1×1, 4×4, 2×3 and 2×4, the desire to support a large number of MIMO configurations in a product portfolio is very large, especially if both RFIC and SoC implementations are supported.
There is thus a desire to provide a more versatile radio transceiver than existing radio transceivers, suitably a radio transceiver that is adapted for MIMO.